Apparently just setting HOME does not work anymore. At least in my Plasma setup XDG_DATA_HOME and XDG_CONFIG_HOME are now interfering. This change introduced an extra helper script to take care of the environment variables which unsets the XDG_… variables and also takes care of QT_PLUGIN_PATH by the way.
3.3 KiB
Testing and debugging Plasma 5 plasmoid with Qt Creator
The following instructions allow to test the Plasmoid by installing it in a test directory rather than the regular home to separate testing from production.
- Build as usual, ensure
NO_PLASMOID
is turned off - Add build step to execute the custom target
init_plasmoid_testing
which will install the Plasmoid in a test directory which is$CMAKE_BUILD_DIR/plasmoid-testing
by default - Add new config for run in Qt Creator and set
bash
as executable - Set
%{sourceDir}/../../syncthingtray/plasmoid/scripts/starttesting.sh plasmoidviewer --applet martchus.syncthingplasmoid
as CLI argument
- It is also possible to use
plasmawindowed
orplasmashell
, see sections below. - This usage of
%{sourceDir}
assumes one used the "Building this straight" instructions from the main README.md.
- Keep
%{buildDir}
as working directory. - In execution environment there's nothing mandatory to be set because
starttesting.sh
should already take care of setting the environment.- The home directory is set in accordance with the directory used in step 2. but can be overridden
by setting
TEST_HOME
- If not already set,
QT_PLUGIN_PATH
is set to$CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR/plasmoid/lib
which should contain the plugin for the Plasmoid underplasma/applets/libsyncthingplasmoid.so
QT_DEBUG_PLUGINS
to 1 for verbose plugin detection
- The home directory is set in accordance with the directory used in step 2. but can be overridden
by setting
- Ignore warning that executable is no debug build, it is sufficiant when the plugin is a debug build (see next section for QML debugging)
Saving/restoring settings
Be aware that plasmoidviewer
will revert Plasmoid-specific settings to the defaults on
startup. So it is not possible to test restoring/saving settings using it.
For this use case, plasmawindowed
can be used instead.
Testing within the real Plasma shell
Some issues are only reproducible within the actual Plasma shell. It is possible to test
with the real Plasma shell in the same way as described above by setting plasmashell
as
executable.
It is only possible to run one plasmashell
at a time so you have to stop your regular
plasmashell
first. While developing you can start e.g. tint2
to be not without a shell.
It works quite well within a Plasma session when both shells are placed on different screen
edges.
Enable QML debugging
To enable QML debugging, it is required to rebuild plasmoidviewer
with QML debugging
enabled.
For Arch Linux, I created the package
plasmoidviewer-debug
for that purpose. Installing this package and using plasmoidviewer-debug
instead of plasmoidviewer
should make enabling QML debugging in the Run section of Qt Creator work.
To create a debug build of plasmoidviewer
manually:
- Get plasma-sdk:
git clone https://anongit.kde.org/plasma-sdk.git
- Create a debug build of
plasmoidviewer
and ensureQT_QML_DEBUG
is defined when compilingplasmoidviewer
, eg. by applying [PATCH] Enable QML debugging. - Prepend the build directory containing the
plasmoidviewer
binary to the path variable in the build environment of Syncthing Tray. - Enable QML debugging in the Run section.